Finance is a really odd section for me to have. I don’t come from a finance background, I have no interest in fin-tech. Yet it makes its appearance here on this blog.
When thinking about this category, I decided to reflect on why its here. It’s usually where curated content sits, rather than my own ideas.
The reality of life in the west is that everything has become financialised. As I write this as people think about web 3.0, they are thinking about payment systems first and working about utility later. This implies that the open web we know won’t be part of the metaverse in terms of ideas or ethos.
Instead of economic growth consumer spending depends on different ways of creating credit. Its no accident that delayed payments finance company Klarna is the biggest thing in European e-commerce at the time of writing this page.
Back when I started writing we were heading into the financial crisis of 2008, the knock on effects of that could still be felt a dozen years later and was a contributing factor to Brexit and Trump victories. The ‘occupy’ movement was catalysed by the financial crisis and then turned into something else. For instance it became a pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong.
We had the implosion of financial brands like Lehman Brothers and the Royal Bank of Scotland. This created a lack of trust in business, the media and the government. We are still seeing that play out today, from cryptocurrency to conspiracy theories and a lack of trust by the public in experts.
Bob Hoffman has been pointing out the problems with the way online advertising has been run for years. Bob’s book Adscam is probably one of the best critical examinations of the online media eco-system and the risks inherent in programmatic advertising.
Bob Hoffman got to speak with the European Parliament. Bear with it as audio improves through the recording.
He also spoke at the Digital Marketing is Broken event.
Interesting talk on the benefits and limitations of economic sanctions with a particular focus on Iran and Russia.
Ireland
I never realised that Sony had a factory in Ireland as early as 1960; Sony globalised production of transistor radios relatively early on in their production life. Compare this to the later US technology businesses setting up shop in Ireland over the next couple of decades. This also might go someway to explain why Sony was such a respected brand in Ireland and shows how visionary and experimental the Sony management were. These comments on Irish workers in 1963 versus their Japanese counterparts are interesting. The assembly workers don’t seem to realise the intrinsic value of (the Sony Japan-made) transistors that go into the products – this might be down to education as this was likely a soldering and screwing products together assembly line.
Suzuki-san points out what he thinks are flaws with Irish workers whilst recognising that this partly down to the different social contract between employee and business. Part of the problem was that Irish workers had the opportunity of going abroad without any government restriction compared to Japan. Suzuki-san didn’t believe that Irish workers are bad workers, but rather they require more investment to encourage them to become good workers.
Interesting perspective on the Windsor Framework from an Irish and EU perspective. Tony Connelly did one of the best podcast series on the Brexit process for RTÉ
Materials
I am a big fan of the Rose Anvil account for the way they take a deep dive into materials and shoe construction. Here’s a great example of their work which shows the design principle of what you leave out is as important as what you leave in a product.
Retailing
Olivia Moore on Temu e-commerce app. Her idea of ‘invisible AI’ is actually more prevalent than Ms Moore thinks, otherwise great conversation to listen in on.
Connie Chan does a short talk on the future of e-commerce.
I was introduced to Gordon Moore and Moore’s Law through a college class on innovation taught by my friend Neil Keegan. I have also just read Michael Malone’s The Big Score; an account written in the early 1980s that Gordon Moore featured in as one of the co-founders of Intel.
Gordon Moore taken for an OnInnovation interview he was doing circa 2008 for the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation
Gordon Moore was a San Franciscan by birth but educated at John Hopkins University, rather than Stanford University. He worked at Shockley and at Fairchild Semiconductor prior to co-founding Intel. In many respects Gordon Moore was more low-key than other Intel founders like Bob Noyce or Andy Grove – but the ideas behind Moore’s Law echoed around the world. The law has been interpreted and misinterpreted by technologists, economists, journalists and policy makers the world over.
Moore’s Law
Gordon Moore made an observation that was published in 1965 and became an immutable forecast for the rest of the 20th century that would guide the direction of the semiconductor industry and every industry that relied upon it.
It started off with an article that Gordon Moore had published in Electronics magazine on April 19, 1965. He observed that the number of transistors were doubling every year over a 10-year period. This relationship was widely known by people working in the field. But the semiconductor field was a small community and the name Moore’s Law eventually stuck.
The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years.
Once, that had been proven correct in 1975, Gordon Moore went on to revise his model to assume a similar effect very two years. This was presented in a speech at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting that year.
All of this meant that technologists like those at the Computer Science Lab at Xerox PARC could spend large amounts of money building foundational technologies and know that the ability to commercially produce these items would catch up ten years hence. Robert X. Cringely posits that much of the dot com bust was down to an industry getting too ahead of itself in terms of what it estimated Moore’s Law could achieve in the mid-to-late 1990s.
Integrated circuits started finding their way into everyday products and facilitating new product categories such as laptops, smartphones and the modern web.
China detains staff, raids office of US due diligence firm Mintz Group | Reuters – “Red alerts should be going off in all boardrooms right now about risks in China,” the source, who did not wish to be identified due to the sensitive nature of the matter, said. China has said it welcomes foreign trade and investment but stressed that security comes before development. U.S. businesses operating in China are increasingly pessimistic about their prospects in the world’s second-largest economy, according to a survey released this month by the American Chamber of Commerce in China. Two-thirds of the respondents cited rising U.S.-China tensions as the top business challenge. Western due diligence companies have got into trouble with Chinese authorities before. British corporate investigator Peter Humphrey and his American wife Yu Yingzeng, who ran risk consultancy ChinaWhys, were detained in 2013 following work they did for British pharmaceuticals group GSK. Humphrey, who spent two years in jail for allegedly acquiring personal information by illegal means, which he denied, told Reuters that providing due diligence in China was even harder now because of a “massive tightening in access to information.” – Ok a bit of context. If Gordon Moore hadn’t died this post would have been Mintz Group + more things – this is how big this is. The Mintz Group is a respected due diligence research company. If you are looking to:
Buy a business and want to know if its real, or what the states of the assets are
Want to ensure that you are not doing business with legally sanctioned entities
If you are a finance firm and want to ensure that the people you are considering to invest in are who they say they are and the business actually exists and works in the way they claim
If you are trying to find out if your supplier is conducting themselves in an honest manner with you
The more opaque China becomes, the less tenable it becomes to conduct work there, do business with Chinese companies or invest in Chinese companies and the Chinese economy. The timing is less likely to be intentionally symbolic than happenstance, but either way it isn’t good news.
Apple ‘Porn’ Filter | Techrights – a disturbing development that opens a Pandora’s box of possible censorship and authoritarian measures in the wrong hands – which its likely to fall given the global ubquity of Apple’s technology
Horns that seemed to portent the apocalypse and stuttering dialogue: ‘none of them received a heroes welcome, none of them, none of them. None of them received a heroes welcome’. This was the soundtrack of 1985 as part of Vietnam Requiem sampling 19 by Paul Hardcastle. At the time the sampling got me interested in music, production, technology and DJ’ing – which pretty much set the path for the various stages of my career to date.
The best part of four decades later and I finally got the see documentary that was responsible for much of the samples in 19. I can understand how Vietnam Requiem might have profoundly affected Paul Hardcastle at the time.
Scott Galloway on Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse and the rise of Saudi Arabia. More on SVB here.
BMW M1
I am a huge fan of the BMW M1 and have written about it before. So I wanted to share this documentary by Jason Cammisa on the car. The putdown of modern BMW’s current 2-series range as ‘Grand Corollas’ is actually an insult to Toyota.
Driving Japan
Before I moved to London, I had a car and drove everywhere. I even drove for leisure. One of my favourite drives was going past the local oil refinery and associated chemical works late at night for the dystopian cyberpunk vibes of mercury vapour lamps reflected from matt zinc coated lagging.
These videos of driving in Japan gave me a similar sense of enjoyment.
Au campaign
KDDI cellphone service brand Au are looking at metaverse and Web 3.0 value added services, which partly explains this new campaign. I think that it is interesting as it reminded me of CD-ROM era motion comic and how Midjourney and Stable Diffusion can be used to reduce production costs on a campaign.
If this all feels a bit 2021, its because large corporate take time to catch up with where things are. I can also understand the attractiveness of the metaverse and digital assets as a concept in modern Japanese culture. Even if it is out far, far ahead of where technology is actually going.
Silicon Valley Bank funded this documentary about their history from their founding in 1983 to 2003. It’s now preserved by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View – one of the towns that make up Silicon Valley.
Bloomberg have done a programme explaining about what happened with Silicon Valley Bank and how it went under so quickly. Silicon Valley Bank had problems due to raising interest rates, issues with their risk management and an abnormally high amount of customers withdrawing funds. However there was also an issue about the way Silicon Valley Bank communicated with the market, which in turn created a crisis in depositor confidence.
Health
Alphabet’s keynote and plans for the health industries. Usual nod to privacy (hahahaha), cloud computing, consumer devices and AI.
Chinese tourists unwilling to pay extra for sustainable travel options even as concern about climate change on the rise, McKinsey and Trip.com report says | South China Morning Post – Chinese travellers are increasingly concerned about climate change and are aware of their environmental footprint, but are still not ready to pay extra for sustainable travel, according to a recent report by consulting firm McKinsey & Company and Chinese travel services provider Trip.com Group. Data from McKinsey, which surveyed a total of 5,457 respondents from 13 countries including China, the United States, India and Saudi Arabia, showed that more than 60 per cent of Chinese travellers were worried about climate change and believed that commercial aviation should become carbon neutral in the future, putting China near the top among the countries surveyed. A separate survey conducted by Trip.com last year showed that almost 85 per cent of Chinese travellers rated sustainable travel as important or very important. However, compared to travellers from other countries, Chinese tourists are reluctant to pay a premium for sustainable travel. Only 20 per cent of surveyed Chinese tourists said they would pay 2 per cent extra for carbon-neutral airline tickets, ranking near the bottom among the countries surveyed – well what would you expect when you have been repeatedly told by your government and media that the west and the United States is to blame for it all anyway? Secondly, civil society like Greenpeace or the Sierra Club can’t operate in China which will also affect awareness
More on the serious issue of violent crime for luxury watches in London. I wrote recently about the ‘London Watch‘ where watch wearers have an empty wrist when going around central London. This is going to negatively impact everything from luxury sales to hospitality and tourism in the UK at a time when the economy can ill-afford to turn down business.
Dow said it was recycling our shoes. We found them in Indonesia | Reuters – Reuters put trackers in usable secondhand shoes to see where they would end up. The main gist of the story is that Dow recycling effort was a failure, which is also embarrassing for their partner the Singapore government.
The idea was the sneakers would be made into playground surfaces. Reuters seems to have stopped investigating the story of Dow recycling shoes, but I was left with more questions about Dow recycling than answers from the Reuters report:
Were some of the shoes more distressed than others?
Do Reuters know what happens to unwearable sneakers that enter the Dow recycling process?
Is it more ethical to sell on lightly used shoes as affordable footwear to Indonesians or recycle them regardless? Reuters doesn’t have an answer to this issue
UK struggles with transition to manufacturing electric cars | Financial Times – foreign carmakers’ core concern is that Britain’s reputation as a stable and pragmatic place in which to manufacture vehicles has been shattered, initially by the 2016 Brexit vote, and more recently by last year’s political turmoil at Westminster. “They are asking whether the UK is a stable partner,” said one person close to the Japanese companies. – Brixiteer economic expert Patrick Minford openly discussed the demise of the car manufacturing industry
Women and ethnic minorities overrepresented in advertising industry, finds report – Women and ethnic minorities are now overrepresented in the UK advertising industry following a decades-long push to improve diversity, according to a new survey. A 2022 census found that an estimated 55pc of employees in the sector were women, compared to 45pc who were men. That was after the number of women increased from an estimated 11,600 to 14,400, an increase of 24pc, the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) said. At the same time, the proportion of non-white employees increased by almost one third to 24pc, compared to 18pc a year earlier. Women made up 51pc of the population in England and Wales in 2021, according to the Office for National Statistics, while non-white ethnic groups comprised about 18pc. In London, where most of the UK’s advertising industry is concentrated, non-white ethnic groups represent roughly 46pc of the population. The IPA said there was more work to do on diversity, as women still only get just over one third of executive jobs in the ad industry, while non-white individuals only occupy 11pc of roles. – Daily Telegraph on how it feels that ‘woke’ addend risks becoming ‘out of touch’ with the British public, but doesn’t manage to make its argument very well.
Walt Disney vs Ron DeSantis: who really won the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ dust-up? | Financial Times – Instead of candidates with backgrounds in economic development or tourism, he packed the board with political allies. Two of them are leading lights in the culture wars that have helped DeSantis build a national profile ahead of a presumed run for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Among them is Bridget Ziegler, co-founder of the conservative Moms for Liberty group and a champion of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” – Disneyland Florida is pretty screwed
